Stormy Weather is really wonderful - it ought to be required reading for everyone who is concerned about our planet's climate, beginning in every high school in the country.

To restore our inflamed atmosphere to a hospitable state requires nothing less than rewiring the entire globe - and replace every oil-burning furnace, every gasoline-burning car, every coal-burning generating plant, with renewable, climate-friendly energy sources. The earth's fossil fuel resources have blessed us with a level of prosperity and abundance unimaginable a century ago. Today they are propelling us forward into a century of disintegration.

Our planet has run out of patience. So has our sense of justice. It is time to step it up - and up - and up - until we reach the only goal that really matters: peace among people and peace between people and nature.

Climate change is not just another issue. It is the issue that, unchecked, will swamp all other issues. The only hope lies in all the countries of the world coming together around a common global project to rewire the world with clean energy. This is a path to peace -- peace among people, and peace between people and nature.

The largest source of greenhouse gases in the coming decades will not be the US, Western Europe and Japan, but the developing economies of East Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. The coming eruption of carbon emissions from the poor world will dwarf any reductions in the North.

The Aedes aegypti mosquito, which spreads dengue fever and yellow fever, has traditionally been unable to survive at altitudes higher than 1,000 meters because of colder temperatures there. But with recent warming trends, those mosquitoes have now been reported at 1,240 meters in Costa Rica and at 2,200 meters in Columbia. Malaria-bearing mosquitoes, too, have moved to higher elevations in central Africa, Asia, and parts of Latin America, triggering new outbreaks of the disease.

Ultimately, I believe - because energy is so central to our lives - that a common global project to rewire the world with clean energy could be the first step on a path to global peace and global democracy - even in today's deeply troubled world.